University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VI
ROME (1859–1860)

THE tramp in Thüringen lasted four-and-twenty hours.
By the end of the first walk, his three companions—
John Bancroft, James J. Higginson, and B. W. Crowninshield,
all Boston and Harvard College like himself—were satisfied
with what they had seen, and when they sat down to rest on
the spot where Goethe had written—

the profoundness of the thought and the wisdom of the advice
affected them so strongly that they hired a wagon and drove to
Weimar the same night. They were all quite happy and lighthearted
in the first fresh breath of leafless spring, and the beer was
better than at Berlin, but they were all equally in doubt why they
had come to Germany, and not one of them could say why they
stayed. Adams stayed because he did not want to go home, and
he had fears that his father's patience might be exhausted if he
asked to waste time elsewhere.

They could not think that their education required a return to
Berlin. A few days at Dresden in the spring weather satisfied
them that Dresden was a better spot for general education than
Berlin, and equally good for reading Civil Law. They were possibly
right. There was nothing to study in Dresden, and no education
to be gained, but the Sistine Madonna and the Correggios
were famous; the theatre and opera were sometimes excellent, and
the Elbe was prettier than the Spree. They could always fall back
on the language. So he took a room in the household of the usual small government clerk with the usual plain daughters, and continued
the study of the language. Possibly one might learn something
more by accident, as one had learned something of Beethoven.

For the next eighteen months the young man pursued
accidental education, since he could pursue no other; and by great
good fortune, Europe and America were too busy with their own
affairs to give much attention to his. Accidental education had
every chance in its favor, especially because nothing came amiss.

Perhaps the chief obstacle to the youth's education, now that
he had come of age, was his honesty; his simple-minded faith in
his intentions. Even after Berlin had become a nightmare, he still
persuaded himself that his German education was a success. He
loved, or thought he loved the people, but the Germany he loved
was the eighteenth-century which the Germans were ashamed of,
and were destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to
come, he knew nothing. Military Germany was his abhorrence.
What he liked was the simple character; the good-natured sentiment;
the musical and metaphysical abstraction; the blundering
incapacity of the German for practical affairs. At that time everyone
looked on Germany as incapable of competing with France,
England or America in any sort of organized energy. Germany
had no confidence in herself, and no reason to feel it. She had no
unity, and no reason to want it. She never had unity. Her religious
and social history, her economical interests, her military
geography, her political convenience, had always tended to eccentric
rather than concentric motion. Until coal-power and railways
were created, she was mediæval by nature and, geography, and
this was what Adams, under the teachings of Carlyle and Lowell,
liked.

He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering between
worlds passed and worlds coming, which had a habit of crushing
men who stayed too long at the points of contact. Suddenly
the Emperor Napoleon declared war on Austria and raised a confused
point of morals in the mind of Europe. France was the
nightmare of Germany, and even at Dresden one looked on the
return of Napoleon to Leipsic as the most likely thing in the world.
One morning the government clerk, in whose family Adams was

staying, rushed into his room to consult a map in order that he
might measure the distance from Milan to Dresden. The third
Napoleon had reached Lombardy, and only fifty or sixty years had
passed since the first Napoleon had begun his military successes
from an Italian base.

An enlightened young American, with eighteenth-century
tastes capped by fragments of a German education and the most
excellent intentions, had to make up his mind about the moral
value of these conflicting forces. France was the wicked spirit of
moral politics, and whatever helped France must be so far evil.
At that time Austria was another evil spirit. Italy was the prize
they disputed, and for at least fifteen hundred years had been the
chief object of their greed. The question of sympathy had disturbed
a number of persons during that period. The question of
morals had been put in a number of cross-lights. Should one be
Guelph or Ghibelline? No doubt, one was wiser than one's neighbors
who had found no way of settling this question since the days
of the cave-dwellers, but ignorance did better to discard the attempt
to be wise, for wisdom had been singularly baffled by the
problem. Better take sides first, and reason about it for the rest
of life.

Not that Adams felt any real doubt about his sympathies or
wishes. He had not been German long enough for befogging his
mind to that point, but the moment was decisive for much to
come, especially for political morals. His morals were the highest,
and he clung to them to preserve his self-respect; but steam and
electricity had brought about new political and social concentrations,
or were making them necessary in the line of his moral
principles—freedom, education, economic development and so
forth—which required association with allies as doubtful as
Napoleon III, and robberies with violence on a very extensive
scale. As long as he could argue that his opponents were wicked,
he could join in robbing and killing them without a qualm; but
it might happen that the good were robbed. Education insisted

on finding a moral foundation for robbery. He could hope to begin
life in the character of no animal more moral than a monkey unless
he could satisfy himself when and why robbery and murder were
a virtue and duty. Education founded on mere self-interest was
merely Guelph and Ghibelline over again—Machiavelli translated
into American.

Luckily for him he had a sister much brighter than he ever was
—though he thought himself a rather superior person—who
after marrying Charles Kuhn, of Philadelphia, had come to Italy,
and, like all good Americans and English, was hotly Italian. In
July, 1859, she was at Thun in Switzerland, and there Henry
Adams joined them. Women have, commonly, a very positive
moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject,
is wrong; and their will, In most cases, ends by settling the moral.
Mrs. Kuhn had a double superiority. She not only adored Italy,
but she cordially disliked Germany in all its varieties. She saw
no gain in helping her brother to be Germanized, and she wanted
him much to be civilized. She was the first young woman he was
ever intimate with—quick, sensitive, wilful, or full of will, energetic,
sympathetic and intelligent enough to supply a score of men
with ideas—and he was delighted to give her the reins—to let
her drive him where she would. It was his first experiment in
giving the reins to a woman, and he was so much pleased with the
results that he never wanted to take them back. In after life he
made a general law of experience—no woman had ever driven him
wrong; no man had ever driven him right.

Nothing would satisfy Mrs. Kuhn but to go to the seat of war
as soon as the armistice was declared. Wild as the idea seemed,
nothing was easier. The party crossed the St. Gothard and
reached Milan, picturesque with every sort of uniform and every
sign of war. To young Adams this first plunge into Italy passed
Beethoven as a piece of accidental education. Like music, it
differed from other education in being, not a means of pursuing
life, but one of the ends attained. Further, on these lines, one

could not go. It had but one defect—that of attainment. Life
had no richer impression to give; it offers barely half-a-dozen such,
and the intervals seem long. Exactly what they teach would
puzzle a Berlin jurist; yet they seem to have an economic value,
since most people would decline to part with even their faded
memories except at a valuation ridiculously extravagant. They
were also what men pay most for; but one's ideas become hopelessly
mixed in trying to reduce such forms of education to a
standard of exchangeable value, and, as in political economy,
one had best disregard altogether what cannot be stated in equivalents.
The proper equivalent of pleasure is pain, which is also
a form of education.

Not satisfied with Milan, Mrs. Kuhn insisted on invading the
enemy's country, and the carriage was chartered for Innsbruck by
way of the Stelvio Pass. The Valtellina, as the carriage drove
up it, showed war. Garibaldi's Cacciatori were the only visible
inhabitants. No one could say whether the pass was open, but
in any case no carriage had yet crossed. At the inns the handsome
young officers in command of the detachments were delighted to
accept invitations to dinner and to talk all the evening of their
battles to the charming patriot who sparkled with interest and
flattery, but not one of them knew whether their enemies, the
abhorred Austrian Jägers, would let the travellers through their
lines. As a rule, gaiety was not the character failing in any party
that Mrs. Kuhn belonged to, but when at last, after climbing what
was said to be the finest carriage-pass in Europe, the carriage
turned the last shoulder, where the glacier of the Ortler Spitze
tumbled its huge mass down upon the road, even Mrs. Kuhn
gasped when she was driven directly up to the barricade and
stopped by the double line of sentries stretching on either side
up the mountains, till the flash of the gun barrels was lost in the
flash of the snow. For accidental education the picture had its
value. The earliest of these pictures count for most, as first
impressions must, and Adams never afterwards cared much for

landscape education, except perhaps in the tropics for the sake of
the contrast. As education, that chapter, too, was read, and set
aside.

The handsome blond officers of the Jägers were not to be beaten
in courtesy by the handsome young olive-toned officers of the
Cacciatori. The eternal woman as usual, when she is young,
pretty, and engaging, had her way, and the barricade offered no
resistance. In fifteen minutes the carriage was rolling down to
Mals, swarming with German soldiers and German fleas, worse than
the Italian; and German language, thought, and atmosphere,
of which young Adams, thanks to his glimpse of Italy, never again
felt quite the old confident charm.

Yet he could talk to his cabman and conscientiously did his
cathedrals, his Rhine, and whatever his companions suggested.
Faithful to his self-contracted scheme of passing two winters in
study of the Civil Law, he went back to Dresden with a letter
to the Frau Hofräthin von Reichenbach, in whose house Lowell and
other Americans had pursued studies more or less serious. In
those days, "The Initials" was a new book. The charm which its
clever author had laboriously woven over Munich gave also a
certain reflected light to Dresden. Young Adams had nothing to
do but take fencing-lessons, visit the galleries and go to the
theatre; but his social failure in the line of "The Initials," was
humiliating and he succumbed to it. The Frau Hofräthin herself
was sometimes roused to huge laughter at the total discomfiture
and helplessness of the young American in the face of her society.
Possibly an education may be the wider and the richer for a large
experience of the world; Raphael Pumpelly and Clarence King,
at about the same time, were enriching their education by a picturesque
intimacy with the manners of the Apaches and Digger
Indians. All experience is an arch, to build upon. Yet Adams
admitted himself unable to guess what use his second winter in
Germany was to him, or what he expected it to be. Even the
doctrine of accidental education broke down. There were no

accidents in Dresden. As soon as the winter was over, he closed
and locked the German door with a long breath of relief, and took
the road to Italy. He had then pursued his education, as it pleased
him, for eighteen months, and in spite of the infinite variety of
new impressions which had packed themselves into his mind, he
knew no more, for his practical purposes, than the day he graduated.
He had made no step towards a profession. He was as
ignorant as a schoolboy of society. He was unfit for any career
in Europe, and unfitted for any career in America, and he had not
natural intelligence enough to see what a mess he had thus far
made of his education.

By twisting life to follow accidental and devious paths, one
might perhaps find some use for accidental and devious knowledge,
but this had been no part of Henry Adams's plan when he
chose the path most admired by the best judges, and followed it
till he found it led nowhere. Nothing had been further from his
mind when he started in November, 1858, than to become a tourist,
but a mere tourist, and nothing else, he had become in April, 1860,
when he joined his sister in Florence. His father had been in the
right. The young man felt a little sore about it. Supposing his
father asked him, on his return, what equivalent he had brought
back for the time and money put into his experiment! The only
possible answer would be: "Sir, I am a tourist!"

The answer was not what he had meant it to be, and he was
not likely to better it by asking his father, in turn, what equivalent
his brothers or cousins or friends at home had got out of the
same time and money spent in Boston. All they had put into the
law was certainly thrown away, but were they happier in science?
In theory one might say, with some show of proof, that a pure,
scientific education was alone correct; yet many of his friends who
took it, found reason to complain that it was anything but a pure,
scientific world in which they lived.

Meanwhile his father had quite enough perplexities of his own,
without seeking more in his son's errors. His Quincy district had

sent him to Congress, and in the spring of 1860 he was in the full
confusion of nominating candidates for the Presidential election
in November. He supported Mr. Seward. The Republican Party
was an unknown force, and the Democratic Party was torn to
pieces. No one could see far into the future. Fathers could
blunder as well as sons, and, in 1860, every one was conscious
of being dragged along paths much less secure than those of the
European tourist. For the time, the young man was safe from
interference, and went on his way with a light heart to take whatever
chance fragments of education God or the devil was pleased
to give him, for he knew no longer the good from the bad.

He had of both sorts more than he knew how to use. Perhaps
the most useful purpose he set himself to serve was that of his
pen, for he wrote long letters, during the next three months, to
his brother Charles, which his brother caused to be printed in the
Boston Courier; and the exercise was good for him. He had little
to say, and said it not very well, but that mattered less. The habit
of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something
remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one
strikes out every commonplace in the expression. Young men
as a rule saw little in Italy, or anywhere else, and in after life,
when Adams began to learn what some men could see, he shrank
into corners of shame at the thought that he should have betrayed
his own inferiority as though it were his pride, while he
invited his neighbors to measure and admire; but it was still the
nearest approach he had yet made to an intelligent act.

For the rest, Italy was mostly an emotion and the emotion naturally
centred in Rome. The American parent, curiously enough,
while bitterly hostile to Paris, seemed rather disposed to accept
Rome as legitimate education, though abused; but to young men
seeking education in a serious spirit, taking for granted that
everything had a cause, and that nature tended to an end, Rome
was altogether the most violent vice in the world, and Rome before
1870 was seductive beyond resistance. The month of May,

1860, was divine. No doubt other young men, and occasionally
young women, have passed the month of May in Rome since
then, and conceive that the charm continues to exist. Possibly
it does—in them—but in 1860 the lights and shadows were
still mediæval, and mediæval Rome was alive; the shadows
breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No
sand-blast of science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history,
thought, and feeling. The pictures were uncleaned, the churches
unrestored, the ruins unexcavated. Mediæval Rome was sorcery.
Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-century
youth what to do with a twentieth-century world. One's
emotions in Rome were one's private affair, like one's glass of
absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal; they must be hurtful,
else they could not have been so intense; and they were surely
immoral, for no one, priest or politician, could honestly read in
the ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that they were
evidence of the just judgments of an outraged God against all the
doings of man. This moral unfitted young men for every sort of
useful activity; it made Rome a gospel of anarchy and vice; the
last place under the sun for educating the young; yet it was, by
common consent, the only spot that the young—of either sex
and every race—passionately, perversely, wickedly loved.

Boys never see a conclusion; only on the edge of the grave can
man conclude anything; but the first impulse given to the boy is
apt to lead or drive him for the rest of his life into conclusion
after conclusion that he never dreamed of reaching. One looked
idly enough at the Forum or at St. Peter's, but one never forgot
the look, and it never ceased reacting. To a young Bostonian,
fresh from Germany, Rome seemed a pure emotion, quite free
from economic or actual values, and he could not in reason or
common sense foresee that it was mechanically piling up conundrum
after conundrum in his educational path, which seemed
unconnected but that he had got to connect; that seemed insoluble
but had got to be somehow solved. Rome was not a beetle

to be dissected and dropped; not a bad French novel to be read
in a railway train and thrown out of the window after other bad
French novels, the morals of which could never approach the
immorality of Roman history. Rome was actual; It was England;
it was going to be America. Rome could not be fitted into an
orderly, middle-class, Bostonian, systematic scheme of evolution.
No law of progress applied to it. Not even time-sequences—
the last refuge of helpless historians—had value for it. The
Forum no more led to the Vatican than the Vatican to the Forum.
Rienzi, Garibaldi, Tiberius Gracchus, Aurelian might be mixed
up in any relation of time, along with a thousand more, and never
lead to a sequence. The great word Evolution had not yet, In
1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had
preached the same doctrine for a thousand years without finding
in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

Of course both priests and evolutionists bitterly denied this
heresy, but what they affirmed or denied in 1860 had very little
importance indeed for 1960. Anarchy lost no ground meanwhile.
The problem became only the more fascinating. Probably it was
more vital in May, 1860, than it had been in October, 1764, when
the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the city first started to
the mind of Gibbon, "in the close of the evening, as I sat musing
in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they
were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of the
Capitol." Murray's Handbook had the grace to quote this passage
from Gibbon's "Autobiography," which led Adams more
than once to sit at sunset on the steps of the Church of Santa
Maria di Ara Cœli, curiously wondering that not an inch had been
gained by Gibbon—or all the historians since—towards explaining
the Fall. The mystery remained unsolved; the charm
remained intact. Two great experiments of Western civilization
had left there the chief monuments of their failure, and nothing
proved that the city might not still survive to express the failure
of a third.

The young man had no idea what he was doing. The thought
of posing for a Gibbon never entered his mind. He was a tourist,
even to the depths of his sub-consciousness, and it was well for
him that he should be nothing else, for even the greatest of men
cannot sit with dignity, "in the close of evening, among the ruins
of the Capitol," unless they have something quite original to say
about it. Tacitus could do it; so could Michael Angelo; and so,
at a pinch, could Gibbon, though in figure hardly heroic; but, in
sum, none of them could say very much more than the tourist,
who went on repeating to himself the eternal question:—Why!
Why!! Why!!!—as his neighbor, the blind beggar, might do, sitting
next him, on the church steps. No one ever had answered the
question to the satisfaction of any one else; yet every one who had
either head or heart, felt that sooner or later he must make up his
mind what answer to accept. Substitute the word America for
the word Rome, and the question became personal.

Perhaps Henry learned something in Rome, though he never
knew it, and never sought it. Rome dwarfs teachers. The greatest
men of the age scarcely bore the test of posing with Rome
for a background. Perhaps Garibaldi—possibly even Cavour—
could have sat "in the close of the evening, among the ruins of the
Capitol," but one hardly saw Napoleon III there, or Palmerston
or Tennyson or Longfellow. One morning, Adams happened to
be chatting in the studio of Hamilton Wilde, when a middle-aged
Englishman came in, evidently excited, and told of the shock he
had just received, when riding near the Circus Maximus, at coming
unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminal had been
put to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had
quite overcome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of
a story till time had blunted it, listened sympathetically to learn
what new form of grim horror had for the moment wiped out the
memory of two thousand years of Roman bloodshed, or the consolation,
derived from history and statistics, that most citizens
of Rome seemed to be the better for guillotining. Only by slow

degrees, he grappled the conviction that the victim of the shock
was Robert Browning; and, on the background of the Circus
Maximus, the Christian martyrs flaming as torches, and the morning's
murderer on the block, Browning seemed rather in place,
as a middle-aged gentlemanly English Pippa Passes; while afterwards,
in the light of Belgravia dinner-tables, he never made
part of his background except by effacement. Browning might
have sat with Gibbon, among the ruins, and few Romans would
have smiled.

Yet Browning never revealed the poetic depths of Saint Francis;
William Story could not touch the secret of Michael Angelo; and
Mommsen hardly said all that one felt by instinct in the lives of
Cicero and Cæsar. They taught what, as a rule, needed no teaching,
the lessons of a rather cheap imagination and cheaper politics
Rome was a bewildering complex of ideas, experiments, ambitions,
energies; without her, the Western world was pointless and fragmentary;
she gave heart and unity to it all; yet Gibbon might
have gone on for the whole century, sitting among the ruins of the
Capitol, and no one would have passed, capable of telling him
what it meant. Perhaps it meant nothing.

So it ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet offered,
fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past,
somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the
Berlin scheme or a Boston future. Adams explained to himself
that he was absorbing knowledge. He would have put it better
had he said that knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive.
In spite of swarming impressions he knew no more when he left
Rome than he did when he entered it. As a marketable object, his
value was less. His next step went far to convince him that accidental
education, whatever its economical return might be, was
prodigiously successful as an object in itself. Everything conspired
to ruin his sound scheme of life, and to make him a vagrant
as well as pauper. He went on to Naples, and there, in the hot
June, heard rumors that Garibaldi and his thousand were about

to attack Palermo. Calling on the American Minister, Chandler
of Pennsylvania, he was kindly treated, not for his merit, but for
his name, and Mr. Chandler amiably consented to send him to the
seat of war as bearer of despatches to Captain Palmer of the
American sloop of war Iroquois. Young Adams seized the chance,
and went to Palermo in a government transport filled with fleas,
commanded by a charming Prince Caracciolo.

He told all about it to the Boston Courier, where the narrative
probably exists to this day, unless the files of the Courier have
wholly perished; but of its bearing on education the Courier did
not speak. He himself would have much liked to know whether
it had any bearing whatever, and what was its value as a postgraduate
course. Quite apart from its value as life attained, realized,
capitalized, it had also a certain value as a lesson in something,
though Adams could never classify the branch of study.
Loosely, the tourist called it knowledge of men, but it was just
the reverse; it was knowledge of one's ignorance of men. Captain
Palmer of the Iroquois, who was a friend of the young man's uncle,
Sydney Brooks, took him with the officers of the ship to make an
evening call on Garibaldi, whom they found in the Senate House
towards sunset, at supper with his picturesque and piratic staff,
in the full noise and color of the Palermo revolution. As a spectacle,
it belonged to Rossini and the Italian opera, or to Alexandre
Dumas at the least, but the spectacle was not its educational side.
Garibaldi left the table, and, sitting down at the window, had a
few words of talk with Captain Palmer and young Adams. At
that moment, in the summer of 1860, Garibaldi was certainly the
most serious of the doubtful energies in the world; the most essential
to gauge rightly. Even then society was dividing between
banker and anarchist. One or the other, Garibaldi must serve.
Himself a typical anarchist, sure to overshadow Europe and alarm
empires bigger than Naples, his success depended on his mind;
his energy was beyond doubt.

Adams had the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and,

for five minutes, to watch him like a wild animal, at the moment
of his greatest achievement and most splendid action. One saw
a quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel shirt; absolutely
impervious; a type of which Adams knew nothing. Sympathetic
it was, and one felt that it was simple; one suspected even that it
might be childlike, but could form no guess of its intelligence. In
his own eyes Garibaldi might be a Napoleon or a Spartacus; in the
hands of Cavour he might become a Condottiere; in the eyes of history
he might, like the rest of the world, be only the vigorous player
in the game he did not understand. The student was none the wiser.

This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illumined
Italian history from the beginning, and was no more intelligible
to itself than to a young American who had no experience in double
natures. In the end, if the "Autobiography" tells truth, Garibaldi
saw and said that he had not understood his own acts; that
he had been an instrument; that he had served the purposes of the
class he least wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought himself the
revolution anarchic, Napoleonic, and his ambition was unbounded.
What should a young Bostonian have made of a character like
this, internally alive with childlike fancies, and externally quiet,
simple, almost innocent; uttering with apparent conviction the
usual commonplaces of popular politics that all politicians use as
the small change of their intercourse with the public; but never
betraying a thought?

Precisely this class of mind was to be the toughest problem of
Adams's practical life, but he could never make anything of it.
The lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the extreme
complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have
learned this from a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid recollection
of the low-voiced, simple-mannered, seafaring captain of
Genoese adventurers and Sicilian brigands, supping in the July
heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary clamor, among the barricaded
streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in order to remember
that simplicity is complex.

Adams left the problem as he found it, and came north to stumble
over others, less picturesque but nearer. He squandered two
or three months on Paris. From the first he had avoided Paris,
and had wanted no French influence in his education. He disapproved
of France in the lump. A certain knowledge of the language
one must have; enough to order dinner and buy a theatre
ticket; but more he did not seek. He disliked the Empire and the
Emperor particularly, but this was a trifle; he disliked most the
French mind. To save himself the trouble of drawing up a long
list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of the whole, once
for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life. France was
not serious, and he was not serious in going there.

He did this in good faith, obeying the lessons his teachers had
taught him; but the curious result followed that, being in no way
responsible for the French and sincerely disapproving them, he
felt quite at liberty to enjoy to the full everything he disapproved.
Stated thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but, as a matter of
fact, several thousand Americans passed much of their time there
on this understanding. They sought to take share in every function
that was open to approach, as they sought tickets to the
opera, because they were not a part of it. Adams did like the rest.
All thought of serious education had long vanished. He tried to
acquire a few French idioms, without even aspiring to master a
subjunctive, but he succeeded better in acquiring a modest taste
for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two sauces; for the Trois
Fréres Provençaux and Voisin's and Philippe's and the Café
Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre, and the Variétés and the
Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant, Rose Chéri and Gil
Perez, and other lights of the stage. His friends were good to him.
Life was amusing. Paris rapidly became familiar. In a month or
six weeks he forgot even to disapprove of it; but he studied nothing,
entered no society, and made no acquaintance. Accidental
education went far in Paris, and one picked up a deal of knowledge
that might become useful; perhaps, after all, the three months

passed there might serve better purpose than the twenty-one
months passed elsewhere; but he did not intend it—did not
think it—and looked at it as a momentary and frivolous vacation
before going home to fit himself for life. Therewith, after
staying as long as he could and spending all the money he dared,
he started with mixed emotions but no education, for home.